[talk] Creating a test lab for OpenSource Operating Systems

[Christos Zoulas]

Hi,

I was asked by George to post here. Some folks at NetBSD have been
toying with the idea to provide a set of test machines that are
internet accessible for testing, performance, and comparison
purposes. Since we (NetBSD) don't have any more hosting space
available, we are asking if nycbug is interested in hosting such
a beast.

The idea is to have a bunch of machines with identical hardware
running different OS's (Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Illumos, etc.) so
that we can compare performance and behavior. We would probably
make the machines netboot standardized images, and people could
reserve time on them to do their work. When the work is completed
people would check the machines back to the pool and any local
changes would be destroyed.

NetBSD can provide some of the hardware (there are lots of decent
machines on E-bay for not a lot of money).

I think that having such as setup would be useful to people for
interoperatibility, compatibility and performance testing.

Best,

christos